Although I forgot to pitch this session at LocalGovCamp I managed to squeeze it onto the agenda and make my plea for help. That call was for assistance in creating a simple comparison framework for common content management systems used or being considered by local government. *
I’d had some conversations online in the weeks before camp about whether this would be a useful thing to have around – my feeling was that council’s looking at open source options may find it particularly useful to choose between a couple of options.
There were a few people interested and on the day it was great to chat through purpose and ideas with Dale Shepherd, Ally Hook, Simon Gray and the guys from Jadu. The feeling was it would be useful and those who are have recently been through a procurement or switch to open source would have experience to share that could stop everyone starting this comparison anew when their time to consider options comes.
I also think it would be a useful companion piece to work that Paul Mackay at Nesta has previously done to show who is using what system at the moment. This could arguably lead to a contacts directory so you use the Framework to get the high level info, then the contacts sheet to talk in more detail with a council already using a system.
My action from the session on Saturday was to throw up a rough framework on Drive so we could crowdsource the initial info – thanks to Dale Shepherd for refining my first draft and for adding information on Umbraco.
If anyone else can add more info or detail then you can find the spreadsheet here. Please feel free to add in extra systems from the few I named off the top of my head here.
Once we’ve got something together I’ll share the results through LocalGov Digital Makers.
* Please note – this is not a replacement for your traditional requirements spec as part of a procurement (yet!) and is looking at basic functionality or technical spec rather than detailed requirements.
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My overview of LocalGovCamp is here and there’ll be a couple more posts this week about other sessions I took part in.
Let’s have a chat on Twitter.